AmaBhulu: The Birth and Death of the Second America, by Harry Booyens, Vancouver, BC: Cliffwood Fogge, 2014, 620 pages, paperback.

America is in obvious trouble, but another Western-minded Christian nation — similar in many ways to our own, though much smaller — is today on the verge of complete annihilation. The forces responsible for the destruction, though, are not done yet.

For Americans living safely in the United States, the tragic death of the “Second America,” caused in part by the leaders of the First, may not seem so significant. But if you are concerned about the future of the First America and even the fate of the rest of the world, the book AmaBhulu is a must read. Written by Harry Booyens, Ph.D., a South African defense and aerospace scientist whose Afrikaner roots trace back to the earliest European settlers in Southern Africa of the 1600s, the book is about much more than just Afrikaners. It is about everyone, and the implications of his startling conclusions should alarm all of us.

In essence, the massive book, packed with documentation from what must have been a Herculean research effort, recounts in amazing detail the true history of the Afrikaner nation — the much-maligned “Second America.” From the arrival of the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to the present-day South Africa, where Booyens’ lost tribe of Africa faces potential extinction in the only homeland it knows, AmaBhulu tells the story of his nation from the very beginning. Also recounted are the many times the Afrikaners have been betrayed: stabbed in the back by the Dutch, the English, many of the native tribes, and eventually, by the entire free world at Afrikaners’ most urgent hour of need. Still they withstood.

Making the story even more readable and compelling is how the author interweaves generations of his own family’s fascinating saga into the history, starting with the first arrivals in his bloodline in the 1600s, running through to today, including his own exodus to Canada. The “Nexus Familia” component, as the author refers to it, allows the reader to see the world and the fascinating history through the eyes of one of the pioneering families that sought to bring Western civilization to the African continent, all in the face of unfathomable hardship and adversity.

But AmaBhulu, the book’s title and the African tribal name of the European-descent Afrikaners, is much more than just another history book about some faraway place and people. Instead, it represents a total indictment of the U.S. government, the United Nations, the Soviet Union, the Western media, and the deadly lies told by the establishment — all of which crucially contributed to what appears at this point to be the likely imminent death of the Afrikaner nation. The far-flung outpost of Christianity and Western civilization contributed so much to the world — from crucial aid in World War II and single-handedly bleeding the Soviet war machine to performing the first heart transplant — before being betrayed by its own. And within the book’s pages are contained powerful lessons for Americans today.

AmaBhulu is particularly important for those Americans interested in preserving their nation, their sovereignty, their self-government, their culture, and their liberties. The endgame becomes clear to see. It is also important because by analyzing the establishment’s destruction of the once-proud Afrikaner, a great deal can be learned about the tools and treachery employed by the forces of destruction today. In fact, a similar blueprint is being followed right now as globalist, communist, and multiculturalist forces coalesce around the goal of destroying Western Civilization and everything it represents: the Christian religion; the traditions of liberty, economic freedom; and more.

Obviously, this review cannot even come close to touching on everything that is covered within AmaBhulu’s 620 pages. There are some elements of the book, though, that are so important, or so shocking, or so enlightening, that they must be at least broached.

The notion of the Afrikaner nation as a Second America, for example, is much more than just hyperbole. Many of the original Afrikaner Voortrekkers fled tyranny and said they were inspired by the Americans, vowing to seek freedom. The Afrikaners’ history with the British, too, bears remarkable similarities, though the history of British oppression in South Africa is far more brutal and barbaric: Consider that the first concentration camps in human history were used to imprison Afrikaner women and children as the British Empire sought to literally exterminate the tiny nation and the two Boer Republics. 

The British saw the parallels more than 200 years ago. One of the Afrikaner Voortrekker leaders, seeking freedom in the South African interior and risking everything to get it, again highlighted the kinship so many Afrikaners felt with their brethren across the Atlantic ocean and the nation they had fought to create against all odds in 1776. “We propose to establish our settlement on the same principles of liberty as those adopted by the United States of America,” wrote Piet Uys, one of the leaders of the Great Trek by pious Cape Afrikaners into the African interior.

In the interior, their leadership was brutally slaughtered by the treacherous and genocidal Zulu King Dingane, who granted them land in exchange for service before savagely betraying and murdering them. The embattled trekkers made a Covenant with God, and somehow, against all odds, a tiny group of a few hundred Boers (Afrikaner farmers) withstood a full-fledged assault by tens of thousands of highly disciplined Zulu warriors determined to exterminate them. After the seemingly miraculous Battle of Blood River, thousands of Zulu were dead, and the Boers had suffered only a few minor injuries. Many still celebrate the day, in accordance with the Covenant. But the battle for survival in Africa for the Afrikaners was hardly over.

They set out to form little Boer Republics and live in peace and freedom, but the nascent nations would never be left alone. The British and the communists would ultimately seek their total destruction in non-stop massive assaults. Consider that the British Empire sent almost half-a-million troops to deal with the rag-tag Boer militia made up of some 40,000 farmers with rifles in the Great Boer War. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, is quoted in AmaBhulu giving his take on the Boers and how they, despite their small numbers, represented such fierce opponents of the mighty British Empire:

Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their country for ever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. Then, finally, put a finer temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer — the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.

The book refutes the modern-day lies aimed at Afrikaners, starting from the very beginning. For example, it completely demolishes the myth that Europeans arriving in Southern Africa promptly began enslaving, plundering, and brutalizing the natives. The reality is almost the exact opposite. Consider, for instance, that many Afrikaners are actually descended from slaves! When the Dutch first arrived in the Cape of Good Hope, originally as part of a refreshment station for Dutch merchant vessels but later for many other reasons, they landed in a vast wilderness only sparsely inhabited by the nomadic Khoekhoe. The Afrikaners’ real contact with indigenous black peoples to the East — the Bantu tribes, many of which were brutal to a degree incomprehensible to the Western mind — came much later as whites moved north and east across Southern Africa and the Bantu tribes went south and west.

Also covered in great detail is the more modern history of South Africa — the real history, in which the Soviet-backed African National Congress of Nelson Mandela slaughtered civilians of all races in the effort to dominate all of South Africa. The book documents a broad sampling of the terror attacks aimed at civilians, the savage tactics such as “necklacing” (burning somebody alive by placing a flaming gasoline-soaked tire around his neck) used by the ANC and celebrated by Winnie Mandela to murder black opponents, and much more. The book also documents in painful detail how almost the entire “Free World” — the United States included — turned its back on anti-communist South Africa as it battled the full might of the international communist conspiracy all on its own. Due to Western and UN sanctions, South Africans even had to produce military weaponry for themselves! Yet still they withstood.

While the Cold War was raging in Southern Africa and Afrikaners and their black African allies were dying in the battle against Moscow and Havana, Americans — plagued with guilt about slavery and Jim Crow, according to Booyens, which had no real parallel in South Africa — were wittingly and unwittingly helping the Kremlin.

The author has no kind words for the system of Apartheid, which he lambastes as wicked and oppressive. The term means “separate development,” and involved a system in which Bantu nations were to be granted full sovereignty in their traditional homelands, while blacks living in Western-minded areas, at least until the later days of Apartheid, lived under draconian controls. But by putting it in context in an objective manner and explaining the background, as well as the chasm between native cultures and Western Civilization, Booyens does a tremendous service to the truth. He presents facts that have been all but lost to mainstream history.

Though the book is mostly focused on South Africa, the reader will learn interesting and important history about many other lands in Africa and beyond. European imperialism in Africa receives considerable attention. Liberia, where freed slaves from the United States were resettled, is also discussed on multiple occasions. Angola, a nation enslaved by Castro and Moscow and used to mount relentless military assaults on the Afrikaners’ outpost of Western Civilization on the continent, is also a key focus, along with Communist Mozambique. The destruction and subjugation of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, by communist terrorists of the most brutal sort also features prominently — along with the fact that Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe and his murderous minions were embraced and defended by the Carter administration, which was responsible for his rise to power and, by extension, his ongoing genocidal and autocratic rule.

If there can be anything approaching quibbles with the book, it came down to two small points for this writer. For one, textbook-width pages with a single column made it slightly more difficult to read. The second point is that the book seems to give more credit to George H.W. “New World Order” Bush than is probably due, merely because Bush at least made the correct decision to put the ANC and the leader of its terrorist wing, Nelson Mandela, on the U.S. terror list. This can likely be explained by the fact that virtually the entire world championed the terrorist ANC as “freedom fighters” while demonizing the Afrikaner — in such a position, any semblance of outsiders acknowledging reality, especially by a top Western leader, must have seemed like a breath of fresh air while drowning.

The book may be especially interesting to longtime readers of this magazine. Long before the communist-dominated ANC came to power in South Africa, The New American was warning its readers about the dangers. Unfortunately, the book confirms in horrifying detail the facts and the worst fears documented in these pages more than two decades ago. Today, the truth is plain to see for anyone who looks — even the world’s top expert on genocide, Dr. Gregory Stanton, has for years been sounding the alarm about the planned government-linked extermination campaign directed against this hardscrabble Christian people. The writing is all over the wall for anyone who has not deliberately buried his or her head in the sand. South Africa and the “Rainbow Nation” is no longer a place for the Afrikaners, who largely built it with their sweat and tears but are now excluded from the economy by racist laws and murdered daily in the most savage manner imaginable.

While the staggering amount of knowledge, insight, and history contained in the book certainly makes it a tremendous value all on its own, there is another element that may be more important still: The potential lessons it has to offer the people of the First America as they struggle against many of the same forces that helped destroy the “Second America.” In South Africa, Americans can get a sneak preview of what might await the West if liberty-minded peoples do not stand up against tyranny and oppression. If the world does not awake from its slumber, the death of the Afrikaner nation may be just the beginning.